Walter E. Williams: Vision, values highlight agenda

In order
to understand the liberal and progressive agenda, one must know something about
their world vision and values. Let’s examine some of the evidence.

Why the
1970s struggle to ban DDT? Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of
Rome, wrote in a 1990 biographical essay: “My own doubts came when DDT was
introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost
eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my
chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the
population problem.”

Dr.
Charles Wurster, former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was
once asked whether he thought a ban on DDT would result in the use of more dangerous
chemicals and more malaria cases in Sri Lanka. He replied: “Probably. So what?
People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to
get rid of some of them, and [malaria] is as good a way as any.”

According
to Earthbound, a collection of essays on environmental ethics, William
Aiken said: “Massive human diebacks would be good. It is our duty to cause
them. It is our species’ duty, relative to the whole, to eliminate 90 percent
of our numbers.”

Former
National Park Service research biologist David Graber opined, “Human happiness,
and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy
planet. ... We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. ...
Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can
only hope for the right virus to come along.”

Speaking
of viruses, Prince Philip — Duke of Edinburgh and patron of the World Wildlife
Fund — said, “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a
killer virus to lower human population levels.” The late Jacques Cousteau told The
UNESCO Courier: “One America burdens the earth much more than twenty
Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world
population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to
say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”

That
represents the values of some progressives, but what about their predictions?

In 1972,
a report was written for the Club of Rome to warn that the world would run out
of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper,
lead and natural gas by 1992. It turns out that each of these resources is more
plentiful today.

Gordon
Taylor, in his 1970 book, The Doomsday Book, said that Americans were
using 50 percent of the world’s resources and that “by 2000 [Americans] will,
if permitted, be using all of them.”

In 1975,
the Environment Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it
will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard
University Nobel laureate biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “Civilization
will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against
problems facing mankind.”

Former
Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, warned, in Look
magazine (1970), that by 1995, “somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the
species of living animals will be extinct.”

In 1974,
the U.S. Geological Survey said the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural
gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, is that
there’s more than a 110-year supply.

In 1986,
Lester Brown, who had been predicting global starvation for 40 years, received
a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, along with a stipend. The foundation
also gave Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who predicted millions of Americans would die of
starvation, the “genius” award in 1990. Note that these $300,000 to $400,000
awards were granted well after enough time had passed to demonstrate that Brown
and Ehrlich were insanely wrong.

Just
think: Congress listens to people like these and formulates public policy on
their dire predictions that we’re running out of something.

WALTER E. WILLIAMS is a professor of
economics at George Mason University. His column is distributed by Creators
Syndicate Inc.

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